Philip Giraldi in the first link reports that intelligence and military personnel he has contact with report that the Russians’ explanation of the chemical attack is true: that a Syrian military attack using conventional bombs on the rebels in Idlib hit a chemical or chemical weapons storage facility that *belonged to the Islamist rebels themselves*. If true, this was all a tragic accident in wartime.

Turning to Trump’s attack on the Syrian Shayrat airbase, unless we see a major escalation of US efforts to remove Assad from now on, this military strike seems more symbolic than anything else. Could it be that the Trump administration did this in desperation to quash the hysterical media lies that Russia hacked the election and that Trump is Putin’s puppet?

But, if Trump does move to ramp up the previous schizophrenic policy of both trying defeat ISIS in Syria and overthrowing the Assad regime, it will result in an utter catastrophe for Syria. It will be a major betrayal of his campaign promises and a Neocon-style foreign policy – a policy which he promised to repudiate last year.

The only real beneficiaries will be the increasingly authoritarian Islamist regime in Turkey, the fundamentalist Arab gulf states like Saudi Arabia, and Israel, who all want Assad gone for their own reasons.

Millions more migrants will swamp Europe. The only credible “opposition” in Syria are Islamist lunatics, who might gain power and then cause a bloodbath in that country.

And as for the media narrative and the line taken by the Trump administration and other Western governments that the Assad regime was responsible for a chemical weapons attack in Idlib province, we should all revisit Seymour Hersh’s brilliant investigative journalism from 2013–2014 on the Ghouta chemical attack of 21 August 2013, and the subsequent facts that came to light:

There is much evidence that the sarin attack at Ghouta in 2013 was perpetuated by the Islamist rebels, but orchestrated by Turkish intelligence in order to draw America into a major war in Syria to overthrow Assad.

So – at the very least – what is needed now is an independent investigation of what happened and who did it, not some hysterical drumbeat for war fuelled by the media, and where the truth is clouded by propaganda from all sides.

As Peter Hitchens says here, this war hysteria and the demands for regime change over WMD are like 2003 all over again.

1 comment:

LK, I was literally just writing a comment on your previous post asking for your insights on Trump's attacks on Syria. I'm sure you're not shocked to find out that when it comes to Syria, my analysis of the situation is pretty much identical to yours. The only possible area of disagreement I'd have is that Asad AbuKhalil, one of the more reliable sources exposing a lot of the BS about the larger Muslim world, didn't find the Russian explanation credible or coherent, and leans towards the Syrian government being responsibles as a result. I'm still skeptical that the Syrian government did it, since it doesn't make any strategic sense at all, but AbuKhalil believing the regime is responsible has me less skeptical than I was prior to reading his analysis.

Hopefully this is more symbolic, to show Trump isn't Putin's stooge as the tinhat liberal lunatics seem to think, as opposed to Trump fully embracing a schizophrenic foreign policy. Mark Ames had noted, though, that Trump's people may be fine with the Russaphobia, as there's nothing there and it provides a distraction away from Trump's dealings with China, where he has significantly more money invested than in Russia.